Whose Knowing Counts?
Tomorrow morning I’ll be leading our ACE Sunday School class at Caldwell Presbyterian through a theologically rich and timely discussion. We’re currently reading and discussing Kelly Brown Douglas’s Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter, and this week we’re tackling pages 84-101, the last part of chapter two. These three sections that build on each other with personal narratives as well as historical insights: “The Implications of White Knowing,” “A Compromised Moral Imaginary,” and “Back to the Conversation.”
Here are the slides I’ll use during our lesson and discussion, which are also linked from the “Weekly Lesson Slideshows” folder on followjesus.wesfryer.com.
Our centering Bible verses are Romans 12:1-2 — “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” I’m planning to ask different members of the class to read these two verses from three Bible versions and interpretations: The King James, The NRSVUE (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition 2021), and The Message.
Douglas would say that renewing our minds is not merely a spiritual discipline. It is a political and epistemological act. The “moral imaginary:” the lens through which we instinctively perceive justice and injustice, can be captured. And when it is captured by an epistemology that normalizes whiteness, injustice becomes literally impossible to fully see.
As we discuss the background and backlash surrounding the teaching of US history and specifically our history and role in enslaving Africans, we’ll watch a sixty second clip from a DC Public Library interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones, beginning at the 9:27 mark, in which she states the core argument of the 1619 Project directly: What if we understood our national origins not through 1776 and its ideals, but through 1619 and the lived practice of slavery?
The class will work through how Douglas uses the 1619 Project debate as a case study in white epistemological privilege in action. The 1619 Project was labeled treasonous by the Trump Administration. At the same time, more than 100 public schools and three colleges remain named for Confederate leaders — including Nathan Bedford Forrest, first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Douglas’s point is sharp: Whose knowing gets treated as dangerous, and whose gets memorialized in stone?
That question is not abstract right now. With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence just weeks away, the 1776 Commission, which President Trump created in 2020 in direct response to the 1619 Project, President Biden rescinded on his first day in office, and President Trump revived by executive order in January 2025, is the live policy context in which this theological argument lands. We are being asked as a nation to celebrate a particular version of our founding story. Douglas asks us to consider: Whose knowing shapes that story, and whose is erased?
We’ll start our lesson with a short clip from Douglas’s own book interview in 2021, at the 25:22 mark, where she describes the “white narrative gaze” and why dismantling it is the precondition for Black lives to truly matter in this country.
Douglas grounds all of this theologically. Faith communities, she argues, are by definition accountable to a future where all people are treated as sacred. That is not a political statement. It is a claim about what resurrection hope actually requires of us. She closes the chapter clinging to that hope — “I’m not ready to pack my bags yet… but we’ll see” — and her words from the interview may be the most important thing we sit with tomorrow: “My task is to create a world where my son’s children and their children will not have to ask their parents, ‘Will Black lives ever matter?'”
One of the VERY encouraging organizations and series of events I’ll draw to everyone’s attention, in the context of next month’s anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence, is the “250 Years of Resistance” webpage of The Freedom Center for Social Justice.
For Caldwell Presbyterian, that task is ours too. We return, as always, to Romans 12:2. The work of renewing our minds continues, and tomorrow morning, we take up that work together.
For more videos and podcasts with and about Kelly Brown Douglas and her book, Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter, check out my post for Heal Our Culture, “Kelly Brown Douglas on Resurrection Hope.” (Also on Substack.)
